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The Evolotion Has Become
The evolution of application platforms and architecture best practices always precedes the evolution of application architectures. In other words, time changes, and then vendor changes their products to adapt to the times.
We have now entered a new stage in the evolution of enterprise applications. Application servers have reached maturity and have become the platform of choice for new applications and development. And Service-Oriented Architecture is quickly becoming the accepted best practice for a wide variety of applications.
Business applications can benefit greatly from Service-Oriented Architecture. For large organizations, business applications typically require extensive customization and integration, and Service-Oriented Architecture promises to make this easier and reduce associated costs. The future of business applications will likely be divided into two camps: large monolithic applications with built-in processes but difficult to customize; and applications built using Service-Oriented Architecture that are more nimble and enable customized processes.
The Evolution of Application Platforms
As the enterprise software industry matured there has been an evolution of the platforms on which applications are built. This evolution is a result of the following cycle:
Vendors use the current preferred platform to build enterprise applications.
Customers and platform providers note duplicated functionality in the various enterprise and home-grown applications, and push to standardize the functionality in the platform itself. Standardization results in greater reliability, simpler administration and improved integration.
As new platform functionality is standardized and accepted, vendors build enterprise applications on the new platform. Vendors do this because customers prefer it, and because it lowers their own development costs since they no longer have to build the platform functionality themselves.
This evolution of application platforms sometimes creates opportunity for new platform vendors – for instance, the rise of the relational database as a standard platform element created an opportunity for companies such as Oracle.
The challenge for the application vendors is greater. An evolution of application platforms means that the applications themselves require a significant change or a complete revision. This is because, as we said, the newly evolved application platform has absorbed many of the proprietary application features into a common standard. So application vendors who are successful within one platform generation are at great risk of being out-dated and overtaken in a new platform generation. |
